Promising WaterPoliticians do more
to deplete water than provide people a sustained supply

At the recent meeting of the World Water Commission in Stockholm
 set up last year with the support of several governments
and United Nations agencies  to develop a vision
for water management in the next century, one of the members
wondered how we would get the worlds politicians to understand
the importance of water, which is going to become increasingly
scarce and polluted in the years to come.

I immediately pointed out that I had not met a single politician
at least in India  who did not recognise the importance
of water, particularly drinking water. But I had hardly met
a politician who knew what to do about the problem, except to
throw money at it. And teaching people that it is going to be
quite difficult.

The problem is that management of water is really a question
of good governance of a natural resource  which includes
a variety of issues ranging from the establishment of proper
property rights and good stakeholder involvement to the establishment
of varied forms of institutions  from the state level
to the private and community level, proper pricing, transparency
and accountability, strict regulation, integrated economy-environment
management, comprehensive environmental management, appropriate
choice of technology, and good research, data collection and
mass education. How do we get politicians to govern properly?

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a party and Shri
Atal Behari Vaypayee as the leader of the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) understand water is important but are clueless
of what has to be done. Both in its 1998 National Agenda for
Governance and the 1999 election manifesto, the nda has promised
that it will spare no effort to ensure that potable drinking
water is available to all villages in the next five years.
This is an absolutely wonderful promise. Moving and delightful.
Water is a matter of life and death in some ways as important
as, if not more, than Kargil. Have you ever suffered from cholera
or cancer because of polluted water or walked miles to get yourself
a pot of that wonderful liquid because of all-round shortage?

But will the NDA be able to deliver this beautiful liquid
in a potable form to Indias people? To that beautiful
sentence, the 1999 election manifesto merely adds that Age-old
and traditional methods of water utilisation, in both rural
and urban areas, will receive urgent attention. As one
of the editors of The Fourth Citizens Report on the
State of Indias Environment which focussed on Indias
traditional technologies and water management systems, I feel
proud that the nda has taken note of Indias valuable
traditions in this field. But will this be enough to meet
the ndas glorious objective?

The reality today is that nobody, absolutely nobody, today
gets potable water. Even the rich and mighty who have dozens
of taps in their houses. Otherwise the bottled water industry
would not be recording a growth rate of 300-400 per cent every
year, if indeed that is true of bottled water, which is more
expensive than milk.

I was one of those who had heard Vajpayeeji wax eloquent about
drinking water in Parliament when it debated the ndas
plan of action in 1998. Vajpayeeji had pointed out, Water
can also catch fire. The problem of water is going to become
even more complicated. The problem of water is not limited
only to India. This has become a world problem. It is possible
that the next major source of tension in the world will be
water, not petrol. The pollution of water is increasing. The
quantity of water is getting reduced. The water-table is falling.
We all see this in our constituencies. We feel disturbed by
the problems people are facing. Sangmaji, we have not given
the assurance that we will do everything in five years. Only
in the case of water, we would like to give the assurance
that in five years there should be good drinking water everywhere.
And this is our commitment. There are such wonderful
words. I was absolutely thrilled to hear them.

But my joy was shortlived. About a year later, after as much
as 20 per cent of the time allotted by Vajpayeeji had gone
by and after the country had exploded atomic bombs, fired
missiles and what not, showing clearly where Vajpayeejis
priorities lay, I checked with the Planning Commission on
what was happening as there was total silence about this issue
in the media. I asked if the Prime Minister had provided any
directions or vision on how the task should be accomplished,
recognising that water management is a very complex problem
and past experience has a lot to teach us about what to do
and not to do. The simple answer was no. So is
nothing happening, I asked? No, that is not true either
said my respondent, we have been asked to allocate more
money for this sector. But what about all the new learning
in this field? Well, it will all be written in the plan
document. Fine, I said, but how will
you ensure that this learning is implemented? My respondent
shrugged his shoulder. It was obvious that no one in the nda
had learnt anything from the innumerable Indian experiences
of the past.

It was during Vajpayeejis regime that an officer as
senior as N C Saxena who, as secretary in the ministry of
rural development, had produced stunning figures on Indias
deplorable record with drinking water programmes. In 1972,
surveys had revealed that there were 150,000 drinking water
problem villages in India. By 1980, some 94,000
villages were covered and some 56,000 were left uncovered.
But the 1980 survey revealed that there were some 231,000
problem villages. By 1985, only 39,000 villages were left
uncovered but the new survey revealed 161,722 problem villages.
Again, by 1994, there were only 70 uncovered villages but
the 1994 survey revealed 140,975 problem villages (See Down
to Earth, February 28, 1998). Why this extraordinary discrepancy
between government records and reality? Because of corruption
and incompetence resulting in bad water supply schemes, because
of excessive exploitation of groundwater forcing the traditional
wells to run dry, because of people giving up their traditional
sources in the hope that the government will help them and
because of growing pollution. Who had heard of arsenic in
groundwater?

Another experience with Vajpayeejis party also left
me equally cold. Despite the bjps professed and repeated
respect for Hinduism, I had not seen any statement by its
leaders on the utterly deplorable state of Bharats rivers
 rivers which are worshipped by Hindus unlike any other
religion in the world. What is the bjp doing to clean up Mother
Ganga, Mother Yamuna and Mother Bhavani? Should we keep throwing
filth on the faces of our mother? What kind of Hindus are
we? One-half or one-third Hindus? Hinduism, in fact, more
than any other religion, is practice rather than religious
ideology. So I asked a correspondent of Down to Earth to interview
bjp leader Kushabhau Thakre.
Thakreji was livid when he heard the questions. He answered,
This is political jingoism. Meaning this is not
an environmental question. Of course, it is not entirely so,
but dont Indias citizens have a right to ask their
politicians questions about their professed ideology and actual
practice? Even more disturbing was Thakrejis answer
on the subject of water supply which the party leader had
talked about with such eloquence. Thakreji merely had three
things to say. One, politicians cannot solve the problem of
water. Two, this is a problem to which solutions can only
be provided by experts. Three, experts unfortunately never
speak with one voice and are often one-sided. So what do politicians
do? (See Down to Earth, June 30, 1998) If I was interviewing
Thakreji, I would have said, This is precisely why politicians
must provide experts with the framework of a clear vision
and priorities for them to do their job. Thakreji was
behaving like any bureaucrat when confronted with a problem:
Just pass the buck.

It is obvious that the bjp and its alliance partners have
done nothing to understand an issue on which they had given
such a solemn promise. It was Rajiv Gandhi who had first given
a high profile to drinking water programmes by making it one
of the five technology missions, whose progress would be directly
reported to him. A reasonably good programme was developed
but a part of it soon deteriorated into a standard pumps and
pipes programme which more often fails to yield water. With
such a complex issue as water, mistakes are inevitable. But
the nda had made no effort to learn from that experience.
Nor did the alliance politicians learn from Digvijay Singhs
work in Madhya Pradesh which would have told them that water
rises in drinking water wells only when an effective watershed
programme is taken up with the peoples participation
as in Jhabua. The programme had nothing to do with water;
it was a programme for watersheds. No one has realised that
to get rid of ecological poverty one first has
to get rid of mental poverty. It is clear that
ndas promise on water is nothing more than words. And
at best it means a lot of valuable taxpayer money literally
thrown down the drain.

The trouble with water is that it quickly collects all the
muck of human society and pollutes itself. Equally, the state
of water in any country reflects the madness, mismanagement
and misgovernance of that country. The Yamuna today is polluted
only because there is total lack of foresight in national
planning, immense corruption in implementing the countrys
innumerable laws, total lack of transparency and accountability
amongst water supply agencies, lack of stakeholder involvement
and unbelievable level of mental poverty in dealing
with this problem. The Dal Lake  the jewel of the Kashmir
Valley  is today dying because of the extraordinary
ingenuity of the hapless local people who are turning the
entire water body into a mass of floating agricultural fields.
Development that has not reached the poor and militancy which
has further robbed them of something that they did have 
tourism  is forcing the poor and the embattled to destroy
their very source of survival.

None of these examples are today unique. In fact, this is
what is happening to every waterbody and Indias water
resources are in a deep state of crisis. People in the hills
dont get water  their traditional springs are
dying  because there has been massive deforestation.
In the plains, innumerable wells  traditional sources
of drinking water called kuas in the North  are losing
their precious liquid because of the excessive use of groundwater
by the agricultural rich for irrigation. Even Kerala which
such high rainfall faces water shortages.

Does anybody know how to control river pollution? Does anybody
know how to sustainably manage and protect aquifers? Does
anybody know how to control the agricultural rich? Literally
nobody does. Unfortunately, nobody is even prepared to learn
from past mistakes. If the nda were to instal more tubewells
for water supply, you can be rest assured the water will disappear
even faster.

NDAs promise on water is nothing
more than words. And at best it means a lot of valuable
taxpayer money literally thrown down the drain
Anil Agarwal

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